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Russia Plans to Promote Technology Innovations

MOSCOW — The Russian finance minister on Wednesday floated a new approach to catching up with the West in technology, a problem that has bedeviled the economy here for decades in spite of the country’s rich tradition in science.

The initiative, described by Aleksei L. Kudrin, the finance minister, at an economic forum, is the latest in a long line of policies trying to free Russia from the boom-and-bust cycles of commodity prices by making better use of the talents of its citizens.

The government will order ministries and state companies to use more of their procurement budgets to buy products that qualify as “innovative” and that are made in Russia.

State procurement orders total about $133 billion, he said, and 15 percent now go to Russian technology companies.

Government orders will “support everybody who wants to work in this sphere, everybody who wants to work for the future,” Mr. Kudrin said.

Translating Russia’s bounty of scientific talent into popular, or even functional, products is a problem that has vexed the country since Soviet times. In a recent survey by Thomson Reuters, Russia lagged far behind China, Brazil and India in registered patents, even though the country’s officials project a self-image of scientific accomplishment. It is now recognized as an acute economic vulnerability because about 80 percent of exports are natural resources like oil and metals, making Russia susceptible to their price swings.

President Dmitri A. Medvedev has made innovation a focus of his tenure, though with few results so far. One government effort is a fund for nanotechnology, Rosnano, which is trying to leapfrog the West’s lead in semiconductors with a next generation of technology products.

Its director, Anatoly Chubais, a former finance minister, told the forum that Russia now lags 30 to 40 years behind developed countries in technology. “We have to admit we have fallen very far behind,” Mr. Chubais said, according to The Associated Press. “Not to understand this would be a very grave historic and political mistake.”

Separately on Wednesday, a research group with ties to President Medvedev issued a report saying Russia must liberalize politically to free the economy from state interference before it can encourage modernization. The group, the Institute of Contemporary Development, suggested reinstating elections for regional governors.

The proposal by Mr. Kudrin would leverage another approach in Russia’s recent history — effective nationalization of parts of the economy and tight control of what private-sector big business remains — to encourage innovation.

In Russian politics, Mr. Kudrin, an architect of macroeconomic policies that helped cushion Russia from the oil price collapse, was seen as an opponent of these de facto takeovers when they happened, and as broadly liberal in his economic outlook.

Next Thursday, a presidential committee on modernization is scheduled to meet with Russian industrialists in the Siberian city of Tomsk to convey the state’s intention to create an indigenous high-technology industry.

In his speech to business leaders, Mr. Kudrin said that government purchasing laws would be changed to redirect spending to high-technology companies and that the same requirements would be imposed on state-controlled companies like Gazprom and Rosneft.

The presidential meeting with private industrialists next week in Siberia will encourage these businessmen, who are largely beholden to the Kremlin, to follow the guidelines.

Government financing is not the best method to prod companies to be creative, said Edmund S. Phelps Jr., a professor of economics at Columbia University who won the Nobel Prize in 2006. But he said it could work.

He spoke at the forum about dwindling innovation in the United States economy. China, India and Brazil are catching up with innovative output, he said, but not Russia.

A high-technology start-up, he said, inherently runs more risk if it can present its product to only one potential buyer — the government — rather than to a range of customers, some of whom may want the product, he said.

“If Russian politicians see that their own prosperity, and that of their people, lies in a more arms-length relationship between the government and business, that would open a lot of possibilities,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on February 4, 2010, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Russia Plans To Promote Technology Innovations. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe